Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology

Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...".

Asking Questions:

Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions.

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Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience.

Linguistics - how do certain dialects get entrenched as "proper form" of the language? When I look at modern high German, it is only spoken around Hannover, and who cares about that place. Similarly, why did standard Midwestern become the "neutral" dialect of American English?

The tldr is that it's a mostly arbitrary distinction. Or perhaps more precisely, it's a political distinction, not a linguistic one. While the traditional definition of dialect usually refers to a concept called "mutual intelligibility" (ie can we understand each other), there are so many exceptions to this "rule" that it really can't be said to be a rule at all.

Rather, if you come from your own country and have the ability to call your particular dialect its own language, you probably do. But if two separate dialects originate within the same country, they're likely to never rise to become distinct languages, regardless of their differences.

That's the trend, at least. But that's kind of the point. There is no actual rule that is remotely consistent when examined with any level of scrutiny. It's just politics, and linguistics doesn't provide a clear distinction.

They don't. Hanover German isn't the same as standard German, dialectal speakers there are influenced by low German. Midwestern American isn't neutral at all. Standard/formal registers are developed politically and not necessarily around a specific region, and most language speakers can use either their local dialect or a more formal register. Midwestern American (technically Inland North or Central Midland) has all sorts of crazy vowel shifts and different ones between city and rural speakers, a great example being heard in Netflix's "Making a Murderer."

This is why Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't allowed to dub his lines in Terminator 2 into German. Arnie is a native German speaker, but has an Austrian accent, which is roughly like the American southern hillbilly accent. It would have been ludicrous for a killing machine from the future to talk like a hillbilly.

Interesting, I'm guessing you are from the midwest. I have always assumed "neutral" American English to be the dialect spoken in California (where I'm from). I always assumed this effect was due to Hollywood influencing popular culture so much.

When I think of a midwest accent I think of the deviants from what I consider neutral. Like Minnesota/Wisconsin (like the movie Fargo) but not as extreme. I'm sure you have similar thoughts about California (maybe surfer/hippie bro or valley girl).

I've always pictured the California accent in my head too, and I'm from the PNW. I lived in Ohio for 4 years and they definitely have a non-standard accent, particularly on the 'a' sound. Pass -> pyass (exaggerated obviously). And Minnesota/Wisconsin does that weird thing with their 'o' sound!

Standard in the sense that it is considered to be the proper form. The way a TV announcer speaks, the way you are supposed to speak in public. I'm not asking for a prescriptivist answer. My question is more on the socio-linguistic side. Why do certain dialects gain such elevated positions?

What would happen if we didn't have a stock market? I don't mean the stock market just up and disappearing, I mean if the concept of a stock market was never invented and we didn't have anything to replace it.

We can extrapolate from the fact that we have both Privately Held and Publicly Held (stock market) companies. Privately Held companies utilize private funding for capital (venture capital/family money/employee money). My guess would be that if we were to eliminate the stock market, we would have an even larger gap between the wealthy and the middle class in the US as the rich would have the ability to use their capital to open businesses and use/seek private equity in a way that the middle class cannot. The middle class would only have CD's, money markets, etc. to invest in and they are fairly low yield historically compared to equities (stocks).

How do CD's and money markets make their money if not by investing in companies? I was under the impression that when you put your money in a CD, or in a bank, they use that money to invest in the NYSE and that's where your interest money comes from

Some banks invest in the stock exchange, but a lot of the money in a bank is used by the bank to issue loans. They can offer interest in exchange for you placing your money with them because the interest they give you is less than the interest of the loans they issue. CD's can have a higher interest rate than normal accounts because the bank knows they can use that money to issue loans without having to worry about it being withdrawn early.

Money Market accounts are named so specifically because the "money market" is what they invest in. The MM is mainly ultra-short term corporate debt. Most companies don't hold large reserves of cash, instead issuing this short-term debt to meet cash obligations when needed, then paying it off very soon afterwards with incoming cash.

The inability to spread risk would limit innovation. And the inability to raise large sums would hamper logistics. Technology would advance much more slowly and unevenly, even between neighboring regions.

All the stock market is is an exchange where people can go to trade (buy or sell) parts of a business that they own.

It is a place that people wanting to buy can meet up with people that want to sell something. It is no different from a farmers market (eBay, AutoTrader, Carmax, Craigslist) where individuals show up to sell their goods knowing that a lot of buyers will be there to buy. So what would happened if we took away farmers markets?

Well, it would be much more difficult for those people to sell their goods since people aren't going to drive around the state going to each farm in order to buy different things they want. It is the same thing with businesses. Take away the meeting place for people to sell a piece of their business and all of a sudden companies have much more trouble raising money (selling a portion of their business in an IPO), people are less willing to purchase a piece of a company knowing that it will be difficult to sell in the future, and lastly, there would be much less info out there about what fair value is for a company - once again depressing values. Public markets allow people from across the world to see the price of something and judge if that is a fair price or not. They can then use this knowledge to make decisions regarding their own businesses, where they should invest their money, etc. If you take away this vehicle for price discovery then people no longer know as well if they are getting a fair price or not. Once again, making people less willing to transact (how nice is it to be able to look up how much something costs from multiple sellers? It gives you confidence to buy that new phone, TV, wallet, shoes).

All of this ultimately leads to people being less willing to let go of their money and an overall less efficient economy. This lack of money changing hands ultimately equates to less business and economic activity.

To bring it back to the farmers markets and Craigslist example, how valuable is it that you can now find a buyer anywhere in your city for a used product? Before Craigslist you might just throw that used product away if it wasn't worth much or at best you take it down to the pawn shop and they give you 5 bucks for it and turn around and sell it for 25 to someone else. With a public market you cut out the pawn shop and get to keep those 20 extra dollars for yourself.

Huge transaction costs. There'd be a lot more wealthy attorneys. Stock markets are regulated, and when you buy a share of stock you are buying basically something that is known and safe--directors and officers of corporations owe fiduciary duties to you, they must publicly report periodically the current status of the business, and prices are set by the market (which, at least the standard economic model tells us, aggregates all possible information about the company).

If we didn't have stock markets and you wanted to invest in a company, you'd have to have a lawyer draw up a one-off contract every single time. You'd also have to do a ton of due diligence. You'd also have to force the company agree to be somewhat transparent with you. These transactions occur all the time right now--venture capital, people buying into closely-held companies, etc.--but they're much more costly to enter into than calling your broker to buy some shares.

From a really rough macroeconomic perspective, the economy would be smaller. In the simplest Neo-Keynsian Model, domestic gross domestic product is the sum of all consumption, plus investment, plus government spending, plus net exports. The investment component would get smaller. By how much? It's hard to say. Most money in the stock market is large institutional investors. It makes sense for them to incur the transaction costs to do one-off purchases of a company's equity. Maybe everything would just shift to a hedge fund model where small-time investors could buy into a fund, and the fund aggregates everyone's money to make the big purchases that would justify the transaction costs.

A hedge fund is just a fund. Funds just pool capital together from smaller investors to take advantage of economies of scale for big investors. Hedge funds differ from other funds in that they have less regulation, they can have more leverage (borrowing money to gamble), and because of those two things, you're only allowed to buy into one if regulators think you're sophisticated to understand the risk you're undertaking.

I only said hedge fund because most people have a vague understanding of what those are. If I just said "fund" or "investment fund," it'd have been more confusing.

A hedge fund is a pool of "high net worth" people who are allowed to invest in companies or other financial offerings. After the Great Depression, the US passed several Securities Acts (1933 & 1934) to protect the public from scams. Basically, if you are not worth at least a million dollars, you cannot invest in high risk high payoff ventures. Venture Capital, Hedge Funds, etc. are for people of means who can accept the risk and can afford lawyers to sue the crap out of each other if it fails.

Without the stock market, either:
(1) A planned system that can produce at least just as good weakly Pareto efficient distributions takes its place and overall outcomes are similar, or...
(2) We see a net loss in overall outcomes.

In practice, it's very hard to achieve (1). In particular, (1) is an NP-complete (Maymin 2010) problem and historically planned economies haven't done so hot in solving it (Dembinsky 1991). We should expect that with our current level of scientific sophistication and technology, (1) isn't likely and so we should expect (2).

How hard (2) hits us will depend mostly on just how good our attempt at (1) is. It's entirely possible we could live a more-or-less first-world life even if we fail at (1) since we're only losing nonessential benefits in quality of life. On the flip side, we could fail at (1) incredibly hard (e.g. we don't bother trying to create such a system) and the net overall loss in (2) could drop us off the first-world nations list.

One thing not really addressed by the other answers is the fact that the stock market is mainly a secondary market where existing shares of companies are bought and sold.

It’s one thing to wonder what would happen if companies could not raise capital through an IPO (primary market). But companies can basically do this without a stock market; they go and find some investors, and give shares in exchange for capital.

It’s another to wonder what would happen if investors couldn’t trade those shares on a secondary market (the stock market). Basically, the stock market allows investors to divest their shares and recoup their investment sooner, if they don’t want to wait. It allows for people to hold more diversified portfolios. It reduces the costs of finding companies to invest in. And it makes the primary market stronger since people know that they can resell if they have to.

For example, I might want to have money to buy a house five years from now. Without a stock market, if I had to invest directly in a company, I would have to wait maybe ten or twenty years to see a return. With the stock market, I can sell my shares at any time to make my downpayment on a house.

Short Answer: If we didn't have stock markets we'd be hanging out in the lawless wastelands that are coffee shops.

​

Long Answer/History Lesson: The trading of various bonds and securities has been around far longer than than the first stock market. It originated from lenders looking to offload high risk, high interest loans by trading it for another loan. This practice evolved eventually into dealing in government issued bonds and eventually stakes issued by early limited liability companies. Stocks really hit their stride during the age of European colonialism with shares of the various East India Companies making many investors very wealthy.

In and around London, brokers preferred to meet in coffee shops and various debt issues and sales of stock were posted to the doors of these shops or simply mailed out in newsletters. In New York, stockbrokers just decided to meet up under the shade of a specific tree on Wall St. These meeting places became unofficial stock markets.

Obviously, ad hoc stock exchanges such as these meant absolutely no regulation. The success and wealth generated by the East India Companies drew imitators like the South Seas Company, and the vast numbers of people trying to get a piece of the action meant stock prices for the SSC went through the roof before their first ship even set sail. This led to the realization in some unscrupulous people that all you really needed to do was issue stock and money would come rolling in. So companies sprang up with asking for investment based on claims so wild it would made David "Avocado" Wolfe blush. One company literally issued stocks based on having a venture so awesome it "couldn't be revealed."

Stock markets as we really know them today came about from this chaos, as it made it abundantly clear that regulation and monitoring was needed in the marketplace. However, it should be pointed out that even today, shares of a company can exchange hands even without a stock market since the stock market only deals in publicly traded shares. If you ever watch the show Shark Tank, people are basically trying to sell shares of their company to investors as a way of fund raising.

companies wouldn't have the investment money to grow and make more products/profits/rewarding the people who invested...

the majority holders of a company stock also get to make decisions in what the company does regarding things like hiring and firing the ceo if they incompetnet or not doing things in the best interest of the investors

also most of the wealthy people you know would not be wealthy. they most likely made the majority of their money from investing, not working and putting all their paychecks into a savinigs account with .02% APR growth

they invested well.

in stocks, bonds, currency trading.

it would also be very difficult to judge how the country/world economies are going

If everyone had a low interest savings account instead of a stock, wouldn't wealth go down but also costs go down as well proportionately?

And without a stock market, would there be interest rate? Where would banks get the extra money to pay you if they didn't have stocks to invest in? All I know is banks make money, but usually through investing. If there were no stock markets, banks would have to actually open stores and produce products to get a return, right?

that's a very good question and the answer overs economic theory on micro and macro level.

i honestly don't think i could give you a good concise answer that isn't my opinion

but based on the fact that you asked that question i encourage you to keep learning about economic theory. i think you might find it interesting based on the questions you are asking.

a lotof people hate it and think it's boring, i personally love discussing it though (i'm sorry i couldn't answer your questions specifically myself , other than i thhink its a topic you might enjoy digging further into my friend.

As an addition- traditional banks like your community bank or big national/regional banks historically make money through lending. You keep your money at a bank in return for them paying you back your money and some extra in interest. While you have your money in the bank, it’s not just sitting there. The bank is lending out your money to other people at a higher interest rate than its paying you (on mortgages, car loans, personal loans, loans to real estate developers, loans to small businesses). The spread between the interest rate the bank pays you and the interest rate it re-lends your money is the bank’s profit. This is warranted because the bank has the scale and sophistication to underwrite these businesses or personal loans in a way that the average person can’t.

Now an investment bank is a totally different animal. They do actually invest in the stock market, as well as commercial+residential real estate, commodity futures, tech companies, etc. Thus the differentiation from a traditional bank.

Anyone know any good resources for understanding the timeline of technological development over the last few hundred years? Does there exist, say, a tree diagram showing which inventions had to exist and which discoveries had to be made before such-and-such a device could be developed?

"Connections" by James Burke is the classic book. Also an excellent BBC series by the same name. The subtitle on the first edition was "A history of civilization according to technological change". It's not an exhaustive reference for all technologies, but it does demonstrate rather empirically that this technological change was never in a very straight line.

I don’t have any good resources on-hand, but the topic you’re looking for is called ‘History of Science’. If you’re looking for a broad overview, the barebones summary of ‘recent’ technological development goes something like this:

Development of non-segmented Steel -> Development of Steam Engine -> Development of Locomotion -> Development if Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) -Development of Flight-> Development of Electricity -> Development of the Integrated Circuit -> Modern Computing.

This obviously leaves out lots of branches like chemistry, material science, medicine, etc.

Very roughly, perhaps. The development of most technologies rely on many other previous advances. It’s certainly not a linear process, and sometimes technologies from centuries prior is combined with modern understandings to produce altogether new technology. If one were to make a diagram, it would be much more like a web than a ‘timeline’.

I'm not sure how technical of a read your looking for, so this might be a little too relaxed of a recommendation, but if you're just looking for something out of a layman's interest, "Convergence: The Idea at the Heart of Science" by Peter Watson sounds like something you'd be interested in.

It gives a rough timeline of pretty much all the larger domains of current science and their accomplishments, and then has a few chapters about the ways they're all converging on to a lot of the same ideas and principles the farther the fields go. Like I said, it's not a super deep dive, because each domain and even each accomplished could be (and are) books of their own, but for a general layout of what you seem to be interested in, it was a very enjoyable read.

Honestly another one of Peter Watson's books "Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud" sounds even more relevant to your question but I haven't actually read that one, though, so I can't speak to it as much. Again, his books are for the layman. I have other suggestions if you're professional looking for something a little more rigorous.

Honorable mentions that seem like they'd be relevant but from more specific angles:

"Energy and Civilization" by Vaclav Smil. Talks a lot of about technology and how we power it. Starts with food energy and human and animal powered tech, ends at present day. Shows what energy harvesting methods proceeded and influenced what technological advancements

"The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" by Simon Winchester. Gives a general history of measurement in mechanical engineering, and what precise measuring instruments/increasingly small tolerances levels for size deviations had to be developed to allow the development of our most high tech instruments like the modern processor

"Infinite Powers" by Steven Strogat. A tour of a lot of the history of mathematics, mostly focusing on the development of calculus. Discusses what mathematical ideas and techniques had to be developed for what advances in technology.

TLDR; It is hard to fund public goods adequately when people have very different preferences over how much to spend.

The standard, broad approach used by economists to understand this issue is through the Tiebout sorting model. Basically, people with different preferences over taxes and the level of a public good—e.g. public parks, schools—will sort into different neighborhoods and cities.

These differing preferences may be based on family size, race, and income. For example, wealthier people and people with children will have a higher willingness to pay taxes and property prices in order to have higher-quality schools. It’s not that poor people don’t care about schooling, of course; it’s just that, given the income constraints they have, they’d rather spend an extra $1k on better public transportation access than a nicer school. Similarly, poor people might be upset if their taxes kept going up to fund more parks, which are usually lower on their priority list.

If we centralize school funding at the State level, so every area gets the same amount of funding based on population or number of kids, what effects will that have? Well, the main problem is that people still have different preferences on school spending but funding is coming from general revenues. So the model predicts that there will be a general decline in willingness to pay high taxes to support schools, as the State can basically no longer price discriminate.

This is in fact what we have found in Michigan and California, where per-pupil school spending was 11th in the nation before school funding was centralized and fell to 36th after school funding was centralized. When funding was centralized, many towns quickly passed ballot measures limiting tax increases.

So the trade off is that with centralization we can get more equal school funding for poor students, but with a diminished ability to charge based on willingess-to-pay we might be forced to lower total spending on schools. These difficult tradeoffs tell us why this is such a contentious issue, and why local funding for many public goods is a popular approach.

Yes, this. PTOs are a great way of looking at the health of a specific school in a larger district. Poor schools will have little to no PTO and no PTO funding for extra books in the classroom, Christmas parties, aftercare, playground equipment, etc. A wealthier school might have so much in the PTO account, they don't know what to do with it.

It’s common for state funding to step in to try to equalize there per-pupil funding. The real inequality is that all schools are poorly funded but the wealthy schools receive more donations so they do ok

In Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States," he talks quite a bit about how in the early days of the pre-revolutionary colonies, the moneyed ruling class was strongly opposed to the printing of paper currency, that doing so would facilitate more equal distribution of wealth down into the working classes.

He makes it clear that debt, property ownership, and other modern economic principles all existed. There were still banks, lenders, etc. Just that there was no actual paper currency, and that this system benefited those already in power.

But he doesn't really go into the economic reason for this, or explain why. And I've always been curious.

The pre-revolutionary colonies had a handful of experiments with fiat currency, all of which ended up with sharp inflation. This is the reason why the founding fathers (who were of the monied, pre-revolutionary colonies) were so strongly opposed to it.

That said, "doing so would facilitate more equal distribution of wealth down into the working classes" is false, except in the sense that inflation tends to impoverish everyone.

An anthropology related question. What are the leading explanations for 'behavioural modernity'? Anatomically modwrn humans are said to have existed for thousands upon thousands of years before they started displaying what we consider 'modern' human behaviour such as art. So what do we think happened to change this?

There are a number of possible causes for the beginning of behavioural modernity - none of which are conclusive. The complete presence of "Modernity" and symbolic thought are loosely chronologically correlated with the emergence of the Later Stone Age in Africa and the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, and can be said to have emerged by 50,000 years before present (for context, anatomically modern Homo sapiens have been identified as early as 300,000 years ago, and agriculture and domestication is approximately 11,000 years old). Rather than behavioural modernity emerging at once, the current consensus is that various traits associated with modernity have accumulated, or occasionally been present in, small population groups since the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens as well as prior to their evolutionary development, with some of these traits having been identified in Neanderthal sites.

This perspective places behavioural modernity as a function of long term cultural exchange rather than swift biological change, such that there is no single "catalyst" for modern symbolic behaviour - and therefore, no single change to explain it.

The most notable paper on the topic is: McBrearty, S. & Brooks, A. S. 2000. The revolution that wasn't: A new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. Journal of Human Evolution, 39, 453-563.

No. Linguistics is not a predictive science. The amount of data collection that it would take to be able to make predictions would be massive, for basically no scientifically interesting or socially valuable payoff.

Economics - how long it will take a country like Venezuela to recover from inflation that is close to 10,000,000% and the salary that is 2$ per month reaches an acceptable level to be able to live with it

Economist here. Hyperinflation is surprisingly easy to end. The reason is that prices are so variable during hyperinflation that firm expectations about future prices are essentially non-existent. All a government needs to do to end hyperinflation is to increase taxation so as to cover the budget deficit and no longer use money printing for financing government spending. This can be accompanied with the creation of a new currency and/or the fixing of the currency to a stable foreign currency, such as the US dollar. For example, the Bolivian Hyperinflation (1984-1987), and Brazilian Hyperinflation (1985-1994) were ended in this way.

Greatly depends on which regulations the Venz gov't removes. It has introduced many price controls and/or seizures of farmland. This removes the pricing mechanism for indicating where resources are to be allocated. Think of how water becomes expensive in post-disaster areas. I know that it may be outrageous that this happens, however this DOES perform the function of sending a signal that says: "hey, there is big money to be made selling water here. Send water NOW" to firms. Another example is that no one invests in unprofitable industries but very profitable industries keep attracting investments because there is demand for the product that the industry is making. Without such price signals, an economy cannot function nor be properly studied and analysed. Hence, it would do well if they removed all fixed prices.

As for the inflation, it would stop if they stopped printing and borrowing money. In fact, the best thing now would be to just introduce a new government currency.

Provided they do those, the economy would start recovering. It would take about 15 to 20 years for the conditions to rise to a level from before their crash.

Given the lack of trust the government's ability to control the country's currency it would be a better idea to adopt another country's currency instead. After the reformation of their government and economy along with a rebuilding of the citizens they could first introduce a new currency anchored to the foreign currency they were previously using before floating their currency again.

Generally IQ tests measure a very narrow set of traits. The test can fairly well predict how someone will perform in the western school system (which is why the test was developed in the first place!), in academic circles, and to a lesser extent working jobs in western society. However, the test measures some pretty specific traits that don't necessarily translate to what many would call intelligence.

Think about it, what would you consider an intelligent human being? Someone who knows a lot? IQ tests don't capture that. Perhaps someone who is good at problem solving? IQ tests capture this very narrowly with restricted problem sets (numerical sequences, pattern extrapolation). Or perhaps someone older who is emotionally mature and full of life's wisdom? You get the gist, the test doesn't capture any of that either!

If you move away from western civilization, IQ tests essentially become meaningless.

So in short, in mainstream society the test is taken to reflect a much broader definition of intelligence than what it is actually designed to capture.

Political science/economics: Andrew Yang has proposed a UBI of $1000 a month to all Americans over 21, and a value added tax of 10%. Assuming that he can find a way to pay for it, what would be some of the less obvious results of this? Obviously this would have a massive effect upon homelessness and poverty levels. Would the economy boom? Would inflation happen? What are the likely downsides and upsides?

We have done studies in the US on UBI/negative income taxes for decades, some of the largest were conducted by the Nixon administration. The results have been pretty consistent, here are the highlights:

Education levels went up. High schoolers from poor families no longer had as much pressure to drop out and start working to help support the family, this allowed them to finish high school at higher rates than their peers.

Production increased. People receiving the UBI were able to quit their part-time jobs, focusing on their full-time jobs. This also freed up part-time jobs or people who needed a source of income but couldn't get a full-time job for whatever reason. As a result of more rested and better education workforce, productivity increased.

Reduction in crime. More poverty leads to more crime, this is a well established relationship, so it should be no surprise that reducing poverty also led to a reduction in crime.

Now, these studies were too small to adequately address inflation and economic benefits, although we had plenty of evidence of improved situations for the individuals. Having said that, runaway inflation like we've seen in higher education is unlikely. Colleges and universities are not competing with Microsoft, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc. for your student loans, at best they are probably competing with one or two other schools and student loans are practically uncapped. With UBI, every company and industry is now competing with every other company and industry for your increased income. McDonald's can't simply convert the Dollar Menu into a Two Dollar Menu overnight because customers can choose to spend that money on literally anything else in existence, legal or otherwise. Companies will still need to produce goods and services and compete for our attention and newly found disposable income.

Edit: Re-reading my post I realized higher education gives us a good example of inflation not happening despite more money being available. Colleges and universities, as I mentioned, are not competing with others for your loans. Private banks, on the other hand, are competing with other banks for your student loans and typically they are competing with quite a few banks. Interest rates for student loans remain relatively low for a loan that is, essentially, un-secured while tuition costs have sky rocketed due to so much funding being available.

Companies like Wal-Mart are likely to suffer. Wal-Mart actually saw an increase in sales during the Great Recession because people who normally shopped at Target chose to cut spending and go to Wal-Mart instead. Other discount chains/stores will also suffer. Long-term this could very well lead to a decrease in spending and increase in savings. I use boots as an example because of my military experience. I can buy a $60 pair of boots that will last a year and save myself some money today, but if I spend $120 I can get a pair of boots that will last me several years, reducing my costs overall. However, if I only have $110 and I need to replace my current boots and buy groceries, the $120 boots just aren't an option.

It is very, very misleading to refer to negative income taxes, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, as UBI.

UBI is, by definition, universal and comes with no strings attached. You get the same amount of UBI whether or not you work, and the same no matter how much you make.

Negative income taxes are wage subsidies, which vary based on whether or not you work and how much you make. At the margin, a wage subsidy increases a worker's willingness to work.

The distinction between the two is extremely important because the effect of UBI on work is the biggest argument against it. The main fear people have is that with UBI you will destroy many people's desire to work and that will prevent them from making adequate human capital investments. It's not unimaginable that a high schooler can fall into a cycle of complacency, living off the UBI while their skills depreciate, and end up in a vicious cycle where they have spent too long out of the labor market and now can't get back in.

Yeah, UBI is sexy because it's easy to explain and has a great sound byte. "$1K a month, for everyone. No strings attached." But NIT makes infinitely more sense. Why would you give rich people an extra $1K a month? They don't give a shit and will probably just put it right into savings which will just raise wealth inequality.

Something more akin to a massive expansion of the EITC (and that sexy, sexy psychologically sound curve it's got) is a way better policy.

Rather than give a detailed analysis, which would be too much for such a broad question, I'm just going to address some misconceptions:

1) Predictions of a boom due to greater consumer spending. In the short-term, this is plausible as lower-income households have a higher propensity to consume than the rich. However, this is a short-term high. Long-term economic growth is based on productivity and investment (capital and human). So arguments based on the "virtuous cycle" of consumer spending are misleading, and not good support for UBI. A better argument is that UBI will increase human capital investment.

2) Inflation. This argument against UBI is flawed. There may indeed be some upward pressure on prices, but in the long-term this is unlikely to be sustained.

3) A VAT of 10% is enough. This is nearly impossible. A lot has been written about how a much larger VAT and other revenue sources would be needed. UBI is super expensive.

Before answering any questions about UBI, you would always have to look at how it would be implemented. E.g. would a UBI of $1000 allow for a good standard of living to those who are unemployed? Would it be able to substitute the current role of the Welfare State? In other words, would UBI serve as a substitute of the social protections that currently exist, or would it be a redistribution of the minimum salary?
Only then can you be able to project how it would pan out. Imo, if the ultimate goal is the first one (the neoliberalism approach of social transference), you would see a decrease in job creation - because, to sum it up, you would be asking of capitalists to give you in income, what they already don't give you by reducing the working hours. Myself, as an European with a relatively strong welfare state, would hate to see an UBI as it's proposed

The value added tax is really weird to think of seeing as America already has a sales tax, though I believe it varies from State to State (I'm a Euro please correct me if I'm wrong) so adding another sales tax (VAT) is like having two income taxes...

I would presume that inflation would run rampant although not at first. For a good comparison look at prices for college tuition before and after government started subsidising it. Something like this, albeit less drastic, would happen. The extent of the inflation would also be affected by the interest rate. If the Fed was to increase it, the increase in savings may hamper it a bit.

This also means that poverty would not be eliminated: if prices rise correspondingly then everyone will be as well off as before. That's why Min Wage only ever works in the short term; cost of living rises and prices adapt hence no overall improvement. Especially if the 10% VAT is introduced, this is the minimum by which prices would rise. Another way to cancel out the inflation would be mass importation of goods and services as you'd have a higher supply of goods and services acting in opposition to the increase in demand but seeing the USs current approach to free trade and the fact that Yang has no strong opinion on it that I know of, I wouldn't count on it.

Now, I know that a condition of your question was that it can be afforded but I have to say it really cannot be afforded.

People say it would reduce people's working hours as they can afford more leisure time. If that were the case (which wouldn't be for long with rising prices) then productivity would go down.

OK, do you actually want me to write "the rightward shift of the aggregate demand curve caused by the greater private consumption factor, which in turn derives from people's increase in funds and higher marginal propensity to consume given that most recipients aren't in the higher income brackets, will extend the supply of goods and services, causing a short term growth of GDP and short term increase in the inflation rate"? Most people don't understand 'marginal propensity to consume' or the 'accelerator effect' because most people haven't read Keynes theory of unemployment or Friedmans monetary thesis which outlines how additional growth in demand will not grow the economy if the economy is close to its productive capacity.

On another note, I'm sorry. You're right, I should have read the rules.

EDIT: It now says "short term increase in the inflation rate" as opposed to "short term inflation rate".

What was the deal with western music spreading in Soviet satellites in the Cold War? Was that like an intentional “culture war” of some kind or how did all of that happen? I saw that article about South Korea playing Kpop across the DMZ and it got me wondering if that’s the same idea.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia was and still is how the US government spread anti-communist, pro-democracy, pro-US, etc propaganda, for a lack of a better term, across the Iron Curtain and today still across the DMZ, among other places.

Part of its programming was to use American culture and music banned in communist countries to tempt Soviet and communist citizens into revolution.

Generative grammar has a fairly broad set of connotations depending on who is using the term. In a technical sense, a generative grammar is a grammar, a set of rules or operations, that defines the set of the acceptable utterances or strings in some language. Often times this term is used in a way that references or conflates it with other ideas that were popularized in linguistics by Chomsky. Threads that get tied in with this include Poverty of the Stimulus and Universal Grammar, which are related to the question of what conditions would make it possible to learn a language, as well as ideas like Transformation and Minimalism which are tools in or styles of grammar. Generally speaking, Chomsky contributed to linguistics by introducing a shift away from behaviorist ideas with new arguments and by focusing on issues of computation and learn-ability.

The first premise of your question would take a half hour presentation so forgive me but I'll skip that one.

The value of anything, as everything, is derived from supply and demand. Printing money when you're in a depression just causes inflation because you have more money for far fewer goods. The most basic way of understanding it is that "money doesn't grow on trees because it would be as valuable as leaves. That's why we don't use leaves as money". All historical examples of hyperinflation come from overprinting of money; Weimar Germany, Inter-War Poland and Hungary, Zimbabwe and Venezuela have all either printed or borrowed money.

Now, the US gov't did something brilliant when it made a deal with OPEC countries; America provides military security to the Saudis and the Saudis only sell oil in dollars so the worldwide demand for dollar is semi-pegged to the demand for oil. Some oil producing countries were allowed to adopt the dollar as their currency in return for the same treatment of oil sales. This is why we refer to it as the petro-dollar. It also explain why the US gov't is soooooo dedicated to maintaining hegemony over oil reserves, directly or indirectly, in case you were wondering.

However, this is also means that the value of the dollar is slightly less in the control of the government as the typical methods that Central Banks use for controlling currency value and exchange rate are: semi-floating, printing and interest rates. With the US, these cannot have the same effect if the dollar is further supported by a) petroleum and b) being the world's reserve currency both of which attribute some value to the dollar.

Please don't make the mistake: this still falls under demand and supply. The petroleum and Reserve Currency status are simply additional factors in the dollar's supply and demand.

Linguistics - Why is it that certain ancient languages (Indo-European languages, for example) used to have quite complex features, such as inflections/modifications for words to indicate noun forms or verb tenses, but the modern versions of those languages have reduced complexity, or in the case of English those inflections are almost completely gone? It seems counter-intuitive to me that this particular complex feature of a language would develop in relatively primitive cultures 5000+ years ago. Am I just looking at it too much through the lens of a modern English speaker?

A very short reply because I'm very tired, but maybe it gives you something new to think about: there's 3 main types of language.

-Aglutinants, like German, shove things together to make words and grammar, and often ends with very long words.

-Aislative? Sorry, can't even remember the name right now. Like Chinese, words are how they are and that's it. Changes in meaning come from word order and the use of certain words that modify others.

-Derivates, like Spanish, which change meaning by modifying the words themselves.

Most languages are a mix of these things, of course - but those are the three main trends. English, for example, is largely Aislative, but adding -s to mark plural is an aglutinant trait.

Some of the most known ancient languages, like Latin, where highly derivative. By comparison, the modern language looks "simplified". But it isn't - its just that languages sort of "rotate" between those three tendencies. Aislative tend to become aglutinant (you end up smashing simple elements together to make more complex ones), aglutinant tends to become derivative (overly big words aren't easy to use. Eventually people start simplifying and simply modifying some words instead of making them bigger). And derivative becomes Aislative (eventually people get tired of all the little details and start simplifying).

This is very, very simplified, but i just can't go on further today. Maybe someone else can elaborate.

You are wearing rather English-tinted glasses! Languages change over time. We are not sure exactly why, but we can trace the trends of change and make educated guesses about how individual speakers contribute to them. You are right that in the majority of Indo-European languages, the number of morphologically-marked noun cases has decreased with time, albeit at different rates. Scholars posit that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) had eight noun cases, and these cases have only been maintained, as far as I know, in a few of its descendants, notably some dialects of Lithuanian.

The idea that language change is a progression from simple to complex, or from savage to civilised is not accurate. Language is always changing, under different pressures and in different ways. The number of case markings or verb tenses is not a metric of how developed the speakers of a particular language are. Finnish has hundreds of potential forms for each word, and Chinese words usually have no different forms at all, but it would be odd to talk about these two nations as at opposite ends of a scale of cultural development.

In IE languages specifically, the original cases were lost because of sound changes, but their function was not. We see the Latin case system (mostly) fully replaced by prepositions and word order in the Romance languages. Thus, Spanish is not 'less complex' or 'more primitive' than Latin. It just expresses much the same thing in a different way.

If I'm following, it sounds like complexity did not reduce overall as IE languages evolved, the complexity just shifted from one component of language to another. Are there examples of languages shifting this complexity in the other direction through history? Like, where the older version had other words and word order to indicate certain meanings, but a later version or descendent language dropped these words and adopted different inflections or something to indicate this meaning?

There's probably a good example! I can't think of one where a clearly analytical language like English or Chinese languages developed into a fusional or agglutinative language, though this is probably because I haven't studied the history of non-IE languages.

However, there is a common cross-linguistic process called 'grammaticalisation'. This is when lexical words (words like giraffe, different or drink, with a clear meaning) lose some of their meaning and begin to be used as grammatical function words. This is particularly common in future tenses for some reason. Again, I will give a Romance example, but this happened in Greek, English and others. In Latin, the future tense was expressed by a verb form: you will buy = comparabis. There was another verbal expression, comparare habes, which meant something like 'you have to buy', using the lexical verb habeo. In spoken Romance, this construction became generalised and grammaticalised. As it was used more and more, the meaning changed from 'have to' to 'will'.

The Latin verbal endings had eroded through sound changes in Romance, meaning that they were less useful in speech. So speakers started using comparare habes instead of comparabis to get the future, and the expression was 'phonologically reduced', or shortened and smooshed together, until it became one word: comparare habes > comprar has > comprarás. Today, the future tenses in most Romance languages come from the grammaticalisation of a lexical verb.

So I guess that's kind of an example of an older version with multiple words becoming a single word in a modern language.

PS If you like grammaticalisation, the French plural negative is awesome!

Often silent letters were not originally silent. For example, the "k" in the English word "knight" was originally pronounced. So it's not like people said "let's add some silent letters," but rather, pronunciation changed over time.

Also, many silent letters indicate a change in how you pronounce a different letter. In English, a silent "e" usually indicates that the vowel should be pronounced long, e.g. in "bite" (as opposed to "bit").

In English spelling, there are a lot of 'silent letters'. Their purpose depends on the specific word, because English spelling can be very irregular. Silent letters often tell us about the history of a word. Because lasagna is an Italian word, the spelling follows Italian rules, where the digraph 'gn' shows a palatal nasal, something very close to the 'ny' in canyon or the same as the Spanish 'ñ', as in España. The silent 'k' and 'gh' in knight are left over from the Old English period, when these letters were pronounced. As English changed over the centuries, speakers stopped pronouncing the sounds, but the written language kept the spelling the same.

The reason English has so many silent letters, and why they are so irregular, is that we have a writing system that tends towards historical (or diachronic) consistency rather than towards present-day (synchronic) logic, unlike the writing systems of many other languages. This means that, while some words are written as they are said, more or less, others contain letters that show the etymological origins of the word. We can see the difference between diachronic and synchronic consistency in English and Spanish:

Both languages have borrowed the Latin verb offendere: in English it's offend, and in Spanish it's ofender. Spanish spells this with a single 'f' because unlike Latin, Spanish does not allow the sound /f/ to be doubled. Neither does English, but we still spell it in the Latin way because it shows the word's Latin origins.

Moreover, as Melior05 has already stated, some letters in English appear silent because they 'team up' with other letters to represent different sounds.

tldr: English spelling is messy because we didn't tidy it up after we stole words from other languages.

In addition to the other answer, some loan words preserve the spelling from the original language. Lasagna is originally an Italian word that English borrowed, so the “gn” orthography might not make sense to us but that’s how the “ny” sound is indicated in Italian orthography. (It’s similar to the Spanish “ñ.”) The same is true with the ll->y in Spanish (like in “tortilla”) or the many opacities of French Liam words (like “hors d’oeuvres” or “faux pas”).

Yes, of course. Jobs, wealth, health, and life satisfaction - to name just a few - are all highly correlated with economic development.

There is an argument about whether quarterly GDP growth is the most important metric (as it is often treated) for an average guy. But there's absolutely no doubt that gross economic development is hugely important.

What is the likelihood of some of these extreme climate change plans actually coming to pass? Assuming one of the dems make it into office could a Burnie administration actually pass a $16 Trillian climate bill, or would he just be blocked by Republicans?

The highest likelyhood is a political climate where the house, senate, and White House are held by the Democratic party. This is informally known as a 'trifecta'.

Many state govts currently have 'trifectas' and with those come some real drastic changes, both more conservative or progressive depending on party control.

On a national level, if there are a minimum of 51 dem senators, 218 dem representatives and a dem president, and they all agree on the bill, no Republicans are needed to pass the law.

The last time there was a democratic trifecta at the national level, the ACA was passed for example. Even then, democrats did not agree on the bill and fought over things such as adding a public healthcare option to the legislation (it was not).

Another great example of a "trifecta" passing through wild legislature is the Kansas Experiment wherein the ex-governor of Kansas Sam Brownback pushed really really hard for some absolutely stunning tax cuts. Didn't take long for the state budget to be in such tatters that the whole thing got repealed, even by the Republican controlled state government.

It is entirely likely if the Democratic candidate wins the 2020 election and Democrats win at least 50 Senate seats. Traditionally, the minority party is able to filibuster any bill in the Senate. But the vice president, as president of the Senate, can change the filibuster rules. So if the filibuster is reformed or abolished, then Congress can pass a Green New Deal or similar legislation.

A trifecta is very unlikely, and especially one where the Democrats have a super-majority in the Senate willing to pass it. One of the issues, with the Senate, even if the Democrats had 60 votes, would be that many states rely on fossil fuel industries for their economies. Joe Manchin, for instance is probably not voting to ban coal, and solve global climate change, because well it's going to greatly harm his state. If a Democrat (lets say Beto) were to win the Texas senate race, he's not going to suddenly hate oil, it employs a lot of his constituents, and harming it will put them out of the job.

Now this is the normal democratic method of enacting a climate policy. The Trump administration has recently provided another avenue. Securitization. Should a new Democratic administration attempt to turn climate change into a national security issue, they may then be able to try raid other funds (namely the military budget) in efforts to combat it. Further they could use regulations and other aspects of executive authority in order to cut emissions.

Briefly on securitization, it is a topic of much study, and looks at how securitizing agents in government are, through the use of language, move issues from non-security topics onto the security agenda giving them outsized importance, and narrowing our views on how to solve the crisis. This can have good, and bad (most of the literature I've seen focuses on the bad) effects on a topic. If Climate Change was perceived as an issue of national security you might be using the Pentagon budget to solve it, but your also probably focusing more on things the military can do (war to stop polluters?) rather than all possible solutions.

Science: Is wind energy really sustainable. Since the turbines transfer kinetic energy, from the wind, and turn it into electrical energy, does that mean we are slowing winds down as they pass through giant wind farms?? Over a very long period of time could this end up effect weather patterns and different climates on earth?

Dogs were trained to fetch food from kills in early human hunting days. Their master kills a rabbit at range, the dog then grabs the rabbit and brings it back for a food or love reward. Do this for thousands of years and dogs learn to love to fetch and pass down those traits.

How did scientists decide when to start the first atomic clock? Presumably we would have either gained or lost time in seconds/hours when initially starting it. Did they have a clock they were using before for reference or just started it as close to solar midnight as possible?

Economics- what would happen if the wealth was spread more evenly? I'm not talking about every billionaire suddenly being average but what would happen if the people will hundreds of millions in cash spread that money out.

I keep hearing about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Can this go on forever?

Well, we must first point out that the wealthy don't typically have their wealth in the form of cash or other money. Rather, it is the value of their accumulated assets. Let's say I have a $60 billion Net Worth. Most of that comes from the value of the shares of companies that I own, then there are houses, electronics, jewelry and some portion of it is liquid money.

Say that $2billion of it is cash, and I gave every adult American my money; that's around $8 per adult person. Now, perhaps if we took more money from more people, then we would end up with a reasonable and meaningful figure. But that's a one-off event. You'd have to wait for those cash reserves to build up again over the years to again redistribute them which as you can imagine would be pretty difficult seeing as from that point onward people would do anything to get their money to a thousand different Paradise Papers places.

So what about wealth? Well, do you mean the physical assets ie. some poor person randomly receiving some jewelry with emeralds? Probably not. So what would happen if you tried to sell the assets to then spread the money out. In the case of shares, houses and jewelry the value of those assets would quickly plummet as either a) your selling all of them so supply skyrocket and price drops or b) you confiscate and sell slowly in which case demand drop in anticipation that people's newly acquired assets might be confiscated and again price is lower. This way, you might find that $12billion in assets could end up yielding as little as $3 billion dollars.

Assuming that such things take place relatively well, the first thing you can expect from this would be massive inflation deriving from the I flux of cash. It would eventually settle at a new equilibrium and so the average person wouldn't end up that much better off in the long run.

Secondly, different people have different aptitudes when it comes to finance. Poor people who have never had any money but win a lottery end up poor again disproportionately often because they have no clue how to handle financial abundance. From this point onwards, seeing as some people will lose money to irresponsibility whilst other will again use their business acumen as well as the current tax code to their advantage would again build up great amount of wealth and we would be back on track to growing inequality.

Only a Bachelors, but one of my professors was an ecologist specific to entomology. You can do research with pesticide resistance as well as invasive species, which both have huge amounts of monetary implications

The word "ecology" was unfortunately hijacked, so I don't know what exactly you are referring to, but the ecology as science is interested in relationships between different living and non-living parts of nature. This usually includes a lot and lot of mathematical modelling, because that's how you are hypotheses and data into more profound theories and getting a new understanding about all of that. The classical mathematical approach used to be a lot about differential equations, Lotka-Volterra predator-prey models, but this can also include SIR or various models of population growth (Malthus).

You would probably include some stochastic modelling in that to include the possible error in your data or unknown factors, this would significantly increase the arsenal of your methods.

Where this can take you? Ecology is interested about relationship between living and non-living nature. This means that anywhere you would need to model or understand these kinds of relationship, there is your niche. Any land (and non-land) management, a typical example I remember from school is an estimation of populations of fish and managing them (and fishing ships) to achieve maximal yields, calculating how much predator-insect you need to fight insect that damages your crops, management of rivers (water composition, its biodiversity) or even investigating and modelling spread of diseases and the most effective response to them.

I think a degree in ecology (especially with emphasize on mathematical modelling) is really cool and arms you with an arsenal of knowledge and mathematical tools that you can utilize in a wide degree of applications. In the end, the world is all about interactions between living and non-living nature:)

Because the core of the modern state is the nation which means if the people of Kosovo wish to leave Serbia their best bet is to argue they are an independent people in need of their own state in order to practice their beliefs. The European mindset is far more open to the concept of every nation having its own state and recognizing those new borders than if Kosovo declared themselves to be part of Albania and tried to get recognition that way. The EU and NATO would say "if you wish to join the Albanian state you have that right, just drive over there, it's RIGHT THERE!" points slightly to the left

If the people of Kosovo wish to be independent of Serbia, they will have to do so as an independent state and maybe down the road they could pull a Texas and join Albania.

Hello, I often ponder about things pertaining to the way we currently handle data and how privacy laws hinder research, but, of course enabling the research might provoke expectations on behalf of the data era we are in...

How useful has "Big Data" been in your work?

Is it still behind too much "Red-Tape" regarding privacy?

How much would it help if "privacy" was no longer relevant in research and you could just pull peoples entire social profiles at will?

What would the epistemology of this be?

Would the implications of "action" on behalf of the data be too risky?

I've certainly seen it on television shows where after so much data and analysis large communities could end up in war over budget cuts, strictly because this "data" reveals the projected lack a successful population.

If you had access to the data, how would you handle it regarding such possibilites?

​

Throwing these in here..

Has AI and Automation improved your workflow?

How effective is the technology you are currently aware of, how long do you suspect until it is where you'd like it to be?

Maybe this is good enough for “normal” AskScience, but since the sun is always shining on Earth are the total energy levels on this planet continually rising (due to plants mainly) or is there some limit to the total energy the planet can have?

The Reddit format means this is necessarily going to be an oversimplified explanation, but it essentially works like this: The Earth absorbs incident sunlight, heating it up. The Earth, in turn, radiates some of that heat back into space (just like the sun does, though the sun is obviously much bigger and hotter). The hotter the Earth gets, the more heat it radiates, so eventually it reaches an equilibrium where the energy received from the sun equals the energy radiated back out into space. In short, the planet changes temperature so that the energy received from the sun is exactly counterbalanced by the amount the Earth itself radiates back into space.

This is one of the fundamentals behind climate change. If the Earth were a bare rock (like the Moon), it would reach an equilibrium temperature and that would be that. But the Earth has an atmosphere, and certain molecules in that atmosphere absorb the outgoing radiation and re-radiate it. Some of that re-radiated energy goes out into space, but some of it comes back to Earth. As the concentration of these molecules in the atmosphere increases, so does the amount of energy they re-radiate back to Earth and the Earth gets warmer. Those molecules are commonly referred to as greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, and the like.

Linguistics: is there any measure of a languages use of tenses? As in are some languages more past, present or future oriented? Can we say which languages are able to convey information about the past, present or future more accurately?

I don’t remember exactly which book, but Steven Pinker wrote about a native tribe in Canada that spoke in a tense to explain how the information being spoken of was learned about. For instance, if it was from a direct source (i.e. primary source) then the person relaying the information spoke in a specific tense. If the information was obtained as a secondary source, then it was portrayed in a whole separate tense. This allowed for an accurate representation on how the info was given so that one could decide from themselves whether or not to believe the info.

The comment above is describing evidentiality, grammatical marking of the source of information. The simplest evidential systems distinguish between direct and indirect (inferred) knowledge; Turkish and Bulgarian are examples of that. More complex systems distinguish sources of information such as sight, hearing, deduction, etc. Evidentiality is separate from tense, but it interacts with tense in certain ways. For example, evidentiality might only be marked in the past tense.

I can't fully answer your question, but you may be interested in this: Some languages have multiple degrees of tense, such as recent past, remote past, near future, and remote future. Complex tense systems are common in Africa, where some languages can have up to 5 past tenses and perhaps as many future tenses. In a large tense system, you may find tenses like same day past, yesterday past, a few days ago past, or historical past.

Economics. Currently long term interest rates in the EU are 0 or negative. Old titles with 4% interest rates trade around 80.
Can the state just buy them back by selling new ones at 0 interest, therefore markedly decreasing its nominal public debt?

Certain native peoples practiced rituals of pain endurance and deprivation in order to enter altered states of consciousness. Was this because they lacked access to psychotropic plants and fungus? Can it be said that shaman figures end up taking whatever the strongest available drugs are, and in cultures where there are no good drugs, they turn to pain and exhaustion to create an altered state instead?

Why does there seem to be little to no consensus on nutritional guidelines aside from caloric intake and vitamins/minerals?

Caloric intake is thermodynamics, and vitamins/minerals is true nutrition. But the dietary recommendations I see today seem to be so inconsistent and convoluted. People use studies to support a ketogenic diet, Mediterranean diet, whole grains and high carb diets, etc. I don’t even know where to look for sound scientific advice for what I should be eating every day.

Nutrition is insanely complex. They are trying to sort out causal relationships between something people eat and what happens to them decades later. Plus every person is a little bit different genetically, and every person's diet is different. Plus different foods may interact with other foods, etc.

The words I and eye are not etymologically related. I comes from the Old English pronoun ic, said a bit like 'itch'. In English, the last sound was dropped, but you can see the resemblance in German Ich or Dutch ik. Eye is from the Old English ēage, whose last consonant was also dropped, and whose vowel was changed to be the same as I. In German it is Auge and in Dutch oog, so the relationship between the two English words is not the same in other languages. It's pretty much a coincidence

However, relation in languages is not the same as in family. I and eye are related because they sound the same. It's like two people who look like twins, but are not genetically related. They have a clear surface relationship, but are unrelated historically.

They are called Arabic numerals because they were introduced to Europeans by Arabic speakers from North Africa. A more accurate term for them would be Western Arabic numerals, as they were more popular in the western Arab world.

Indo-European languages are a group of languages that all came from the same language that existed 6000 years ago. We speak differently from our grandparents and differently from people we never talk to, and those changes build up over time and make one language evolve into several. The languages in the Indo-European family are cousins that share the same grandmother.

Why cant we humans form a supergovernment that has a set of rules applied to all humanity? Do not kill, everyone is equal, do not hurt nature etc.
We can now see whats going on on the other side of the planet and instantly ''correct'' it. Religion paved the way with its moral rules and gotten so many aboard with it, maybe it would be the same with SG. The supergovernment should of course be seculary, keep the different contries as ''states'' and still do trades.

I just did a project on the Nacirema people and I was wondering how have they survived all this time? They hated the human form, don't promote having children, and when sick they endure sadistic rituals that might lead to death. Despite everything, they are thriving and happy people. I don't get it

Economics - How is a public interest bearing debt ethical ? What will happen when the WACC of the states is higher than the inflation rate ? Why is no one talking about the #1 unsustainable system in the world ?

The early defences of debt were that deficits would be used to get out of depressions and then tax revenue surpluses from prosperous times would pay down the debt incurred by the deficits.

When the interest payments become too high, either the gov't cuts spending to all other departments to pay for it, or it will have to start defaulting on the debt which would collapse the value of the dollar and drastically reduce the amount of public and private sector investments from abroad, probably setting off another Great Depression.

There are plenty of people who are talking about this, and many are discussing how to prepare for this if you know where to look. The thing is, most people don't care or won't care because having to deal with it would mean cutting down the military as well as the rapidly growing Social Security spending neither of which are going to grant you much support if you were to do both. Secondly, saying that there is "a large debt of unfathomable size which we must pay for or else the economy will suffer" is about as vague as saying "in 40 billion years the sun will become a Red Giant and swallow the Earth" No one cares. Similarly, saying "we must fix it now because its a disaster!!! (even though it hasn't been so for the past 100 years of us doing so)" is as alarmist as the environmentalists who said "we only have 10 years left" 20 years ago. People stop caring.

They use entirely different data sets. The predictions for 100 years are for an entire year (maybe more) and for the entire globe, in many instances.

Simplest way to think of it is like a dice. Roll it over and over. Predicting the next result is hard and you've got a 50% chance of being wrong. Roll it thousands, or millions, of time and you can predict extremely accurately the overall result.

Edit: Just, FYI (and as this thread includes economics). There's an extremely similar phenomenon in a economic forecasting. Economists are fairly patchy at predicting short-term conditions, but pretty good at predicting long-term cycles.

You guys do this every wednesday? Any chance astrology will be a topic in the near future? Your link for past posts sent me to a page where the last post was 4 years ago and i have a question about jupiter thats been eating at me for about 6 years now..

Are there any economic theories or concepts that relate to our current economy? Specifically stagnant wages, higher cost etc. Are there any examples to look at? I've been interested in the economic angle of how this is affecting things. I want to learn more about it.

Is there an energy conservation-related theory to understand global economy? A theory of sorts in which monetary unit can be substituted with equivalent unit of energy. Sorry, I know the question is ignorant beyond belief.

With the massive population difference and a shrinking gap in technical disparity, as China and India rise, why is the US (or the UK) still so relevant and dominant in the global economy? Is this intentional design or just bias as a result of living here? How long do we expect this to last?

Political science - how accurate are attempts to predict the outcome of elections? For example, would it be more reasonable to assume that Trump's 2% victory chance was just a stroke of luck, or was it a failure in the predictions?

Trump didn't have a 2% chance of winning, 538 had him in the 30% range just before the election.

Predicting an election is difficult, but generally US elections have pretty good polling and predictions. The main thing that's going to predict if a prediction is good or bad, is who is doing the predicting.

Lots of polls, and good polls is important for analyzing a US election. But for the US Presidential election the electoral college introduces a further difficulty. The national polls were pretty much dead on in 2016, but those don't matter, because really only a half dozen states matter in a presidential election.

Pennsylvania polls for the most part had Clinton and Trump within a couple points of each other, and well within the Margin of Error of the polls, and Trump would win by .7%. This is why Nate Silver gave him a 30% chance of winning, he was down in these states often, but within the margin and him squeaking out a narrow victory in these states while losing the popular vote overall is how he'd have to win, and how he did.

British polling on the other hand is far worse and I'd put much less faith in it.

Predicting the outcome of elections should be based on polling where the people polled are representative of the population of likely voters. Assuming that sampling is done well and that conditions at the time of the poll are identical to conditions during the election, polls are generally accurate (95% CI is the standard.) However, there is some random error inherent in surveys ( normally around 2-3%).

Way back there was a guy on BNN that presented a year by year graph of how much money globally is being invested into green energy. I was wondering if anyone has any graphs that can show global investment in green energy?

If we look through history, over the course of time, empires have risen and fallen. Economically, territory-wise, the spread of their beliefs etc. Is there a way to ascertain which "empire" or country will be or is on the rise now?

Honest question: From a purely economics perspective, what has the current administration done to make a) the economy and b) the stock market 'strong' and 'good' and on the other hand I hear 'about to crash' and heading into a recession. What has this administration actually done (politics aside)?

Linguistics Anthropology. Is there any research on the possibility that early proto-human speech developed through sexual selection? Bird song has definitely been driven at least partly by sexual selection. I also note that modern humans seem to be sexually attracted to singers (and guitar players). Sexual selection would provide a selection mechanism for small improvements in the mechanics of speech production long before the intellectual ability to use it for sophisticated communication arose.

Psychology - Why does external motivation kill internal motivation? I hear this all the time with freelance photographers or artists slowly losing interest in what they do because it feels like a job to them. I just don't understand what exactly makes external motivation a detriment.

Economics- Why countries which are not located in the old “rich” world(Europe, Middle East etc) experienced a substantial economic growth in the late human history? I’m referring to countries like US, Australia, Canada...

Human body/medicine: Is alcohol-free beer healthy/good for you? I've been told that beer in general consists of things that are good for you/healthy - except the alcohol. So would a beer with no alcohol be considered healthy?

What are some good books on sociology I should read? I don’t mean pop science I mean books by people like Durkheim and stuff. I’ve started studying sociology in college as a freshman and I have previously studied philosophy that deals with similar concept and I’ve got to say I really enjoy it so far and want to learn more outside the classroom

Evolution: why is the last active time period for human evolution considered 100,000 years ago. Other species evolved dramatically during that time period, wouldn't humans as well? I know humans have evolved some particularly in their digestion as an adaptation to agriculture, but is there anything else that stands out?

If humanity gave up on money and used intelligence and hobbies as a value then is I possible than human colonies on Mars will be created faster? And if so how long should it take for all countries to abandon money as a value?
Hope it is understandable and logically correct.

When will the next ice age begin if we take into account the fact that on average a ice age comes every 10 000 years or so and we are about 200 or so over it already ....(Correct me if I'm wrong) .... Knowing that global warming is one of the thing that show that ice age is coming?
(Again , correct me if I'm wrong)

Anthropology question. Around what time do we think the first 100% homo sapiens appeared? I'm a little bit confused on the genetics portion, but from what I understand is that one day a humanoid was born that did not completely resemble the genetic makeup of their parents, and over generations then, a full homo sapiens was born? Or is it that two humanoids gave birth to a full homo sapiens due to genetic mutations/evolution?

Is the observable universe the universe. The wording is very confusing but to my understanding anything outside of the observable universe will never reach us because space is expanding. But do we know their stuff outside of the observable universe. Say you could instantly teleport to the edge of the universe can you then see further then what we can see from our "center"